Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Exodus 16:1-7, 14-21, NASB
- Series: Jesus in the Old Testament (2024), no. 4
- Date: Sunday, November 3, 2024 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Provision in the Wilderness
I tease my wife periodically about overpacking when we’re going on a trip, at least until I need something she packed that I didn’t. Then I can’t really tease her for it. I probably shouldn’t tease her anyway, because I overpack just for driving around town.
I want to be well prepared. I don’t like leaving the house without one of my trouble bags, as I call them. Each one has a tire iron, a contraption that will jump-start a battery or air up a tire, a toolkit, and a code scanner in case we get a check-engine light, because all our vehicles are twenty years old. They get check-engine lights all the time.
Usually, I will also have a drink with me: tea, Coke Zero, something like that. I don’t like to leave the house without provisions even if I am only driving around town. If we are going on a road trip, I do not necessarily overpack the clothes, but we have to have snacks.
There are places where you do not want to be stuck without being well supplied. The one that comes to mind is the stretch of road through New Mexico toward Santa Fe where there are no gas stations, no place to stop and get anything to eat, no water, and no cell service. You are on your own until somebody comes by. I have not been stuck on that road, but I have been stuck on another road near there when my alternator went out, and thank the Lord, I had an extra car battery in the back of the vehicle. Otherwise, you are stuck in the desert.
The desert is not a place where you want to be without being properly supplied and provisioned. This morning in Exodus 16, we are going to look at what happened to the Israelites when they went into the desert without adequate provisions. It was not entirely their fault. I am not criticizing the Israelites for that. They were told to get out of Egypt in a hurry, take with them what they could, and head out into the desert.
In that sense, they were being obedient to what God had told them to do. But even with that preparation, their journey was so long and so arduous that they did not have enough to get to where they were headed. They got out into the wilderness and realized the provisions were running low. They were almost out of supplies and food. And they began doing what I do when the snacks run out on a road trip: they began to complain.
That is where we pick up in Exodus 16. Exodus 16:1 says, “Then they set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the sons of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departure from the land of Egypt. The whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The sons of Israel said to them, ‘Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.'”
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether or not they will walk in My instruction. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily.” So Moses and Aaron said to all the sons of Israel, “At evening you will know that the Lord has brought you out of the land of Egypt; and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, for He hears your grumblings against the Lord; and what are we, that you grumble against us?”
Even after the Lord provided this manna for them, they began to complain about that as well. I suppose they got tired of the manna, and so God sent them quail to catch and eat. But we are going to skip over that part and go down to verse 14, where He continues to talk about them gathering the manna.
Verse 14 says, “When the layer of dew evaporated, behold, on the surface of the wilderness there was a fine flake-like thing, fine as the frost on the ground. When the sons of Israel saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat. This is what the Lord has commanded: Gather of it every man as much as he should eat; you shall take an omer apiece according to the number of persons each of you has in his tent.'”
The sons of Israel did so, and some gathered much and some little. When they measured it with an omer, he who gathered much had no excess, and he who gathered little had no lack. Every man gathered as much as he should eat. Moses said to them, “Let no man leave any of it until morning.” But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and became foul, and Moses was angry with them. So they gathered it morning by morning, every man as much as he should eat. But when the sun grew hot, it would melt.
As we continue this series of studies on pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament, we cannot ignore this story about the manna because in John 6, Jesus compares Himself to it. This is not something I went digging for and made up. This is something Jesus Himself said: that He is represented by this manna in the Old Testament.
Bread Given for Life
They were wandering in the wilderness, and they were hungry because their provisions had begun to run out. From the way it is phrased, I do not know whether it was the fifteenth day of the second month after they left Egypt, meaning two and a half months after they left, or whether it is saying they left Egypt in the middle of the first month and now it is the second month. I do not know. It could be one month. It could be two and a half months. We just know they had been in the wilderness a while.
The provisions began to run out, they began to complain, and God prepared this manna for them. With the manna, God gave His people life in the desert. What was going to happen if they wandered around the wilderness without something to eat? They were going to die. If we do not eat for long enough, especially while doing something strenuous like wandering around in the desert, we are going to die.
So for them, it really was a matter of life and death, much like last week when we looked at the Passover lamb and them being hidden behind the blood on the door. It was a matter of life and death for God to provide this for them. In a very real and tangible way, God gave them life in the desert.
They whined, and God provided for them. I do not think that is always the way it works, where we go complaining to God and He just gives us what we want. I have not found that to be the case. But in this case, they were whining, and God gave them what they needed. We know it was what they needed and not merely what they wanted because, after a while, they began to complain about what they were getting to eat.
This manna is something we are still not one hundred percent sure about. It is not like anything we have available to us today. When you read on through Exodus and read the descriptions of the manna, it gives the color of it and says it was colored like bdellium, which is a mineral. In appearance, it was like coriander seed, but apparently smaller, because it was as fine as the frost on the ground.
We are going to start seeing that in the next few weeks. When you see frost on the ground, pay attention. I know that if you are anything like us, you are usually just trying to herd everybody out the door and do not have time to stop and look at the ground in the morning. But early in the morning, when you have the opportunity, stop and look at that frost that has developed on the leaves and the grass. Look at how delicate it is.
The Bible says that is what the manna was like. They would go and gather it up. Some of it they would boil, some of it they would bake, and some of it they would make into a porridge by boiling it. This is what they ate. Somehow or another, the Bible says it tasted like wafers mixed with honey. I do not know what kind of wafers, but that sounds delicious. I would love at least to try this, but evidently it is not something readily available to us here on earth. It is something God sent down from heaven.
God did this to keep them alive. He gave them manna in that moment when they were saying, “We are about to die.” They complained that God had brought them out there to kill them, but God did not merely give them that manna in that moment to keep them alive. God continued to provide that manna for forty years while they wandered in the wilderness.
God is the one who told them they were going to wander in the wilderness for forty years, but that was in response to their disobedience. It was their fault that they were out there. Yet God continued to take care of them and continued to provide for them.
God continued to give life to His people despite the fact that they had not acted right. They had not done anything to deserve His provision. God continued to care for them and continued to do the things that would keep them alive for forty years.
The reason I have brought this to your attention today is that this manna represents Jesus, and it represents Jesus because He is the bread of life. As I said, in John 6, Jesus calls Himself that and tells the Pharisees and those who are listening the story of how, in Moses’ day, God provided manna to the Israelites. He says that God gave their fathers physical bread, and now, with His coming, God has given spiritual bread.
Jesus used the manna story to point them to His purpose in coming. Not only that, I believe that was part of God’s purpose in the way He gave the manna. Just as He provided the sacrifice in Abraham’s day, and just as He worked through all the things Joseph went through, and just as He worked through the Passover lamb, God was leaving us this trail of breadcrumbs through the Old Testament so that we could find our way to Jesus when He showed up. Those who were paying attention when Jesus showed up were able to find Him.
The Manna and the Messiah
This manna represents Jesus because He is the bread of life. I want to outline a few similarities, a few parallels between Jesus and the manna so we can get an idea of what God was doing here.
As in the previous weeks, I looked through the Old Testament story and asked, “What looks like a parallel to Jesus?” Then I gathered the ones I could see and looked to see what other people had written about it. In some cases, there have been points where I thought, “I did not see that.” In other cases, I thought, “I did not see that because I do not think it is actually there. I think you are grasping at straws.” So I have tried to avoid grasping at straws and give you a short account of what I think are some of the real parallels here between the manna and Jesus.
First, the manna was given to them by God. It was not something they planted and grew. It was not something Moses came up with. They could not run down to Atwoods and buy manna seeds every year. This was something God provided for them on a daily basis. It was entirely in God’s hand to provide, and only God could have provided it.
The New Testament says the same thing about Jesus. Romans 8:32 says that the Father “did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all,” and then asks, “How will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” The manna was given by God, just as Jesus was given by God the Father.
You might think that is a stretch if that were the only parallel. But again, when there is only one similarity, or even two, you might think someone is drawing patterns where there are not any. But when you begin to see three, four, and five, it gets a little harder to call it a coincidence.
The next thing is that this manna came from heaven. Verse 4 says, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you.'” We might use that terminology in a metaphorical sense. We might say something was given to us by heaven. But here they are talking in a literal sense. It is not simply that someone gave them something and it was a blessing. There is no naturalistic explanation for this. The only explanation for how this arrived is supernatural, and we know that because, after 3,500 years, scientists still do not know what the manna was. Theologians still do not know what the manna was. There is no natural explanation for this.
The manna came from heaven. Jesus said the same thing about Himself in John 6:51: “I am the living bread that came down out of heaven.” That was His whole story. You read the first chapter of John, and that was the message of Jesus: that He was sent by the Father to earth, sent from heaven.
The Apostle Paul talks about how Jesus emptied Himself. In context, he is saying that Jesus deserved to be enthroned in heaven. He deserved to be in glory and to be worshiped by the angels. That is what He deserved, and yet He stepped away from that to come down here and be with us. He came from heaven to man for our salvation.
We also see in verse 15 that the manna was not understood by the people it was sent to. When the sons of Israel saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” Has your child ever said that to you when you set something down on the dinner table? “What is it?” I think I heard that this morning when I made breakfast. One of the little girls said, “What is it?” It was toast and cream cheese, just like she had begged me for last week. But then she said, “I don’t want that. I’m not eating that.” Okay.
The manna was served to them, and they said, “What is it?” They had never seen anything like it before. They were not sure what to do with it. As we read the story, we realize it took them a little while to figure out how this worked, even though God told them the rules. Gather enough for the day. Do not hang on to it until tomorrow. They tried to do that anyway, and it went bad. That is an understatement. When the passage talks about worms, it was not something you would want to eat the next day. They were puzzled by this stuff.
The New Testament tells us the same thing about Jesus: He was not understood by those He was sent to. John 1:11 says, “He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him.” When it says “His own,” it means He was sent to the people of Israel. If anybody should have understood who the Messiah was when He came, it was Israel, because they had the Old Testament Scriptures with this trail of breadcrumbs leading to the Messiah.
But so many of them missed it. Some were paying attention and realized who He was, but the majority in His day missed it. They did not receive Him as their Messiah. They did not even receive Him as someone they wanted alive in their midst anymore. They rejected Him in every conceivable way.
That is why, right after the triumphal entry, as Jesus looked at the city of Jerusalem and wept over the people, He said in Luke 19, “If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes.” He went on to say, “You did not recognize the time of your visitation.” God sent His Son to them, and they did not recognize Him. They did not understand who He was.
Grace for the Undeserving
This next part gave me goosebumps when I recognized it. In verses 1 through 3, they are wandering through the wilderness outside Egypt. Verse 2 says, “The whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.” Then they said, “Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt.” The way we would say it is, “I wish God had just killed us when we were in Egypt.”
They remembered the pots of meat and how much bread they had. They said they ate until they were full. They ate until they were stuffed with bread. Have you ever done that? You go to a buffet, fill up on the bread, and then think, “I should not have done that. There is all this other good stuff.” They remembered so much meat and so much bread, and they said, “We used to have a wonderful time, and you all have brought us out here in the desert just to kill us all. This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?”
That is my paraphrase. They did not say “you all” in ancient Hebrew. But they were talking to Moses and Aaron, and by extension to God, saying, “You brought us out here in the desert just to kill us all.”
Are you going to continue to feed those people if that is their attitude? I looked at one of my kids this week and said, “If that is how you are going to act when I make you breakfast, when I make what you asked for, you are on your own. Go find a granola bar or something. I am not making breakfast.” Apparently, God is a lot nicer than I am.
The manna was given to the people of Israel even though it was totally undeserved. When I realized how they were acting, what they deserved from God, and the fact that what they deserved was not what they got, that is where I say I got goosebumps.
The New Testament tells us that Jesus was given when we did not deserve Him. Romans 5:8 says, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus was not sent for the salvation and forgiveness of wonderful, lovely, deserving people. He was sent as the payment for sinners. He sacrificed Himself on behalf of and for the good of those of us who did not deserve Him.
The only role the Israelites had in all of this was to receive the manna. They did not really have to go out and work for it. You might say, “Well, they had to go harvest it.” Yes, but God did all the work. They were just going out there and picking it up. It did not even say they had to gather a barrel full. They just gathered, brought it back, and had exactly what they needed, whether they had gathered a lot or a little.
Their only role was to receive it, just as our only role is to receive the salvation Jesus has already provided. Yes, once we are saved, we are to serve God, be faithful, and work hard out of our salvation. But whether we work hard, whether we accomplish a lot, or whether we accomplish a little, that salvation that has been provided for us is exactly what we need in order to be reconciled to the Father.
That is why John 1 says, “As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.” All they had to do was receive the manna God had provided.
As I have already pointed out, the manna gave the Israelites exactly what they needed. There was no stockpiling the manna. A few hundred years earlier, the Israelites had gone to Egypt because Egypt had stockpiles of food, and that was what kept Egypt and the Israelites from starving. I would imagine that somewhere in their collective memory was the idea, “We probably ought to prep for disaster and have stockpiles of food on hand.”
But they could not do that with the manna because it would go bad. Instead, every day, God gave them exactly what they needed. God supplied all their needs, just as He tells us in Philippians 4 that He will supply all our needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus. When it comes to spiritual things, Jesus Christ supplies exactly what we need.
The Bread of Life
The comparison between Jesus and the manna may not be as obvious as the blood of the Passover lamb was last week if Jesus had not pointed it out in John 6. But I think it was one more crumb in the trail, pointing people in the right direction to understand what Jesus came to accomplish and to understand that, when He did come, Jesus would be our only source of spiritual life.
Jesus is our only source of spiritual life. Spiritually, this world is a desert. I know the world is full of spirituality, but none of it leads to true life. None of it leads to true connection with God.
In the wilderness, there were lots of things they could have eaten. Technically, anything is edible. It is just a matter of whether it is good for you or not. They could have eaten sand. People still do things like that today. I saw a short video on YouTube where people were making cookies out of clay, and apparently, in whatever country this was, pregnant women like them. People will eat anything.
But out there in the wilderness, only the manna was going to give them life. And folks, we can find things that may satisfy for a minute, but in this wilderness we live in, Jesus is the only one who is going to bring us spiritual life.
In John 6, when Jesus talks about it, He tells His listeners, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.” What He means is that they died eventually, not from the manna. “This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.”
Jesus is telling them that there is precedent for this, for God providing something that brings life. But the Old Testament manna gave them life for a little while. It sustained them for a day. Jesus compares Himself to the manna and says that manna kept people alive for a little while. He will keep His people alive forever. He will give life that never ends.
He says, “I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Jesus compared Himself to this Old Testament manna that was given so the people would not die in the wilderness. Jesus is the spiritual bread who has been given to us so we do not die eternally.
Just as He points out, we receive this eternal life when we believe Him enough to receive Him as our Savior. It is a very simple story of what the bread of life, Jesus, came to accomplish.
You and I have sinned against a holy God. I realize that in our world today, that is unpopular to say, but it is true. And we are not saying, “The world out there are sinners.” I am not saying, “You all are sinners.” I am saying we are in that category. I am in that category. We are all in that category.
We have all sinned against a holy God. Anything we think, say, do, or fail to do that displeases God is sin. If we are honest with ourselves, we realize that we all fall into that category. Sin is offensive to God, not merely because we broke the rules, but because the rules are based on who He is. So it is not merely saying, “No, I am going to pick something else.” It is rejecting Him when we embrace sin instead of embracing Him.
Because our sin is offensive to God, and because God is just, our sin has to be punished. We do not always like to hear that, but if we are honest with ourselves, we understand that it is right. If we read in the newspaper or see a story on the news about a criminal who is clearly guilty and found guilty of a heinous crime, a crime against a child or something like that, and the judge says, “You have been found guilty, but we are just going to let it go this time,” we lose our minds over that, and rightly so. We know that sin has to be punished. We know that justice demands it, and our sin has to be punished.
Part of our punishment is that we are separated from God, not only here but in eternity. We are separated from God here in that we do not have the relationship with Him we were created to have, and then we are separated from Him in eternity in hell.
But there is a way out of that. Jesus Christ came and took responsibility for our sins. He was nailed to the cross and shed His blood, taking the punishment we deserved and paying the debt we owed so that you and I could go free.
If we believe that He is who He said He is, that He is God’s Son and our Savior, if we believe that He died for us as He claimed, if we believe that our sins are forgiven because He died, and if we believe that He rose again to prove it, that is all it takes to have that forgiveness. We receive it. We ask for it. We believe that our sin needed to be paid for and that Jesus Christ accomplished it.
Then, because of Him, we are received into God’s family. The Bible says we are adopted. The verse I read earlier says that He gave us the right to be called the sons of God. We are adopted into God’s family, and we have real spiritual life for the first time. We have that connection with God.
We have eternal life, not because of anything we have done to earn it or deserve it, but because God provided it when Jesus Christ paid for it.